Standards rivals' collaboration could have major impact - Modern Healthcare

The Medical Health Record:

The medical record is not the first standard to grow up with competing standards that have ground their way down into collaboration and consolidation. This industry like so many others will have data variablity compressed out of their wick by the needs of the people, services, and systems they serve. On a simple scale consider the radical retro-fit of the eLearning space from wild variablity, to competing standards, to the unifies standards for content today. This will happen in healthcare as well--its inevitable, Darwinian if you will.

Good article on Standards:

Standards rivals' collaboration could have major impact - Modern Healthcare

As interested as I am in re-thinking the modern "community" bank, I am even more interested in seeing the emergence of a unified medical record for patients that helps the doctor's practice inherit the history of the patient enabling the doctor to treat, manage, and bill that patient more effectively.

In the future, and this future is inevitable, (though the time frame is variable), the patient, doctor, and insurer will all win from the efficiencies created by the interoperable patient medical record.

Patient:

Patient's will move through their lives with a medical record as convenient as an email account. We will lve with our medical records as transparently as our Amazon shopping history.

Doctor:

Doctors will be able to handle patient histories with the ease of a blog post and bill patients with the ease of tagging. Through video, voice, phone, stylus, or keypad the doc will have every option for encapsulating diagnoses in the patient's lifelong record: from birth to death we will be anthologized in our medical record.

Insurer:

The insurer's will be pulling needed data from a cloud of data optimized for satisfying the criteria of that insurer's coverage. The insurer won't do any work to accomplish this--like IMS data --there will be a subscription to the patient's permission-based feed and every piece of form data that the doctor's office and the patient typically have to enter, and re-enter, and re-enter again will be automatically, securely, fulfilled.

Timeline?

This future is inevitable. The question now becomes are we 5, 10 or 50 years away from the seamless management of our health records?